ASIATIC TRIBES OF NORTH AMERICA. 189 
and the Aymara and Quichua of the Southern Continent ; and, 
intermediate between the Asiatic and American divisions, the 
Peninsular languages of Asia will occupy an important position. 
The Altaic languages least in sympathy with this family are the 
Mongol, whose affinities are largely Dravidian. At the base of this 
large family the Accad stands, whose relations are probably more 
Peninsular than anything else ; and next to the Accad in point of 
antiquity and philological importance is the pre-Aryan Celtic, which 
lives in the Quichua of to-day, as I showed in a contribution to the 
Societé Americaine de France, and in a list published by Dr. Hyde 
Clarke in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute. Dr. Hyde 
Clarke had long before connected the Accad and the Quichua-Aymara, 
and had linked the Houssa with the Basque. He has also directed 
attention to Basque similarities in Japanese and Loo-Choo. Most 
of the tribes composing this family were known to the ancients as 
Scythians, so that the ancestors of our modern Iroquois may have 
over-run Media and plundered the Temple of Venus at Ascalon, 
tantalized the army of Darius or talked with Herodotus in the 
Crimea. Types of mankind, in a savage state, do not greatly change, 
as may be seen by comparing the Tinneh or Algonquin tribes with the 
Iroquois and Choctaw. Languages long retain their earliest forms, as 
is apparent in the Japanese somots and Loo-Choo shimutzi, which 
are just the old Accadian sumu<, samak, a book, that were spoken in 
ancient Babylonia perhaps four thousand years ago. This continent 
may yet furnish materials in philology and kindred departments to 
lay side by side with the literary and art treasures of the ancient 
seats of empire on the Euphrates and Tigris, by which to restore the 
page of long-forgotten history. Atany rate there is a path from the 
Old World into the New by the Asiatic Continent, as well as by the 
islands of the sea. Discouragements enough have been placed in the 
scholar’s way by one-sided minds and students of a single language or 
science. It is time to treat them with the contempt that all narrow- 
ness deserves, and to aim at making ethnology more than a state- 
ment of unsolved problems. 
It would be well for all who hold the essential diversity of 
American from other grammatical forms, to ponder the statement of 
one, who, himself no mean philologist, has generally shown little 
favour to any attempts that have been made to reconcile the Old 
World and the New in point of language. I allude to M. Lucien 
